Bench Overflow

Inspiration

To help strengthen Daugherty community and create a way for consultants to connect and help each other build up skills to best service our clients

What it does

The application will be a tool for consultants to use to post questions and interact to help colleagues and hopefully learn from each other.

The tool features a message board where consultants can create questions or reply to them, in addition integrate with existing Daugherty tools, to link them to skill builders to help identify the consultant skill set, slack to directly message each other, or engage for incentive boost to keep the consultant interested in using the application

How we built it

Front-End was built using React-Redux and Typscript API were built using Django Database clusters we used MongoDB hosted on AWS UI/UX was built using Bootstrap and JQuery

Challenges we ran into

Using an unfamiliar front-end modern technology e.g. React - For example: ○ Getting functionality to work as expected ○ Issues with getting integration working with UI/UX Hosting the API's on AWS Elastic Beanstalk - Inexperience with the technology

Accomplishments were proud of

- Taking a risk on unfamiliar technology and being able to create a stable proof of concept 
    ○ Also learned more about the technology and able to bring that experience back to the client engagement with more knowledge
- Being able to formalize a solidified idea and planned execution well and early
- Being able to plan architecture with scalability in mind
- Being able to identify MVP, Nice to have, and Stretch goals during the early stages of our planning
- Attempted to host API's on AWS Elastic beanstalk

What we learned

- Risks in taking unfamiliar technology can have setbacks 
- Should have tried integrating front-end and UI/UX earlier 
- Could have done better with time Management such as Prioritizing tasks and time-boxing research/troubleshooting

What's next

- Came up with Market identifiers for the application for example:
    ○ Integration with slack 
    ○ Integration with Email 
    ○ Integration with skill app
    ○ Integration with engage for incentive 
- Opportunity for Emerging Technology such as 
    ○ Machine learning 
        § Smart Search technology 
        § Analytics 
    ○ Internet of Things 
        § Questions or topic search to solve problems
- Bots